KENGO KITO

15 Jan 2014 - 10 Feb 2014

Kengo’s choice of material for his work is influenced by daily life in Japan. The hula-hoops, laces, chains, threads, mirrors and other ready-made articles he uses in his pieces are all common sights. He plays around with such ordinary objects and assembles them into two and three-dimensional creations, installations and videos. Since moving to Berlin in 2010 he has been choosing old furniture and tableware which contain historical meaning, as well as natural materials such as twigs and precious stones. He has in mind acentric images such as micro-organisms which infinitely reproduce through repeated cell division.

His work has been called “Bio pop” and is a vigorous style of art that interjects sub-cultural noise with the cool restraint of the city, revealing the complexity, chaos, vitality of nature and the biological world that we identify with jungle trees and viruses.

Kengo says: “Since my college years the painting of Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) gave me some ways of thinking about art. Her mindset about ‘painting’, the materiality is three dimensional, like relief, but on the other hand the surface of itself looks like thin skin. Is this painting or what? I’ve been sublimating the interpretation of her artwork into my artwork.”